Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays
Volume 7 (2001-02): 50-77
Resident Aliens:
R. S. Thomas and the Anti-Modern Movement1
Grahame Davies
Progress
is not with the machine;
it is a turning aside,
a bending over a still pool.
(“Aside”, R. S. Thomas)2
In the fourteenth century, many people felt the social and religious foundations of Europe were crumbling. The Black Death had devastated entire populations; the Hundred Years War had put France and England in conflict for generations; God’s authority on earth, the Papacy, was divided between Rome and Avignon; the Peasants’ Revolt in England and similar uprisings across the Continent were threatening the economic and social order; and the ideas of the precursors of the Protestant Reformation were starting to threaten the philosophical unity of the religious world. The world of medieval Christendom was coming to an end, and modern nationalism was coming into being.
Despite all the fear and uncertainty, it was also a period which witnessed a great blossoming in religious mysticism of a daring, original and perceptive kind, producing a remarkable crop of visionaries who would be counted among the great figures of Western Christendom ever afterwards. In England there was Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Juliana of Norwich and the anonymous author of the Cloud ofUnknowing;in Flanders, there was Jan Van Ruysbroeck; in Germany, “Meister” Eckhart, Gertrude, Henry Suso and Johann Tattler; in the Netherlands, there was the German Thomas à Kempis; and in Italy, there was Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno.3 As Clifton Wolters says in the introduction to his edition of the Cloud of Unknowing and other works:
The surprising thing about this particular upsurge is that it happened when it did.... It was in this restless, unsettled age that mysticism revived, and men turned from the rage and storm to consider rather the calm depths that lay beneath. It was as children of their age of course that they ‘turned aside to see’, and what they saw they describe to us in their own idiom, which reflects the hopes and fears of their day.4
Every age has its hopes and fears, and in every period one can find individuals who, threatened by the present, shun the world and seek the eternal. Henry Vaughan might be an example: pursuing his nature mysticism in the Breconshire countryside as the world of his former Anglicanism had been shattered. However, some times of change are so major as to transform entire civilizations. In revolutionary periods like that, a reaction of flight or fight takes place on a much wider, trans-cultural scale, and it is common for some individuals in many of the affected cultures to turn away from the material world in a very intense way, seeking the transcendent with urgency and passion. It happened in the fourteenth century. It also happened in the modern age.
We havejust come to the end of a century which has seen stupendous changes in the economic, social and intellectual structure of the world. For those who cling to values such as religion, tradition, civilization and order, the twentieth century was not a good period. Two world wars devastated entire countries and exposed the weakness and corruption of human nature and human society; profound economic crises showed how inhuman the industrial system could be; and the material and intellectual tendencies of the West were all apparently bent inexorably on destroying all traces of tradition, certainty and belief. It appeared the local was yielding to the central, the spiritual ebbing before the material, and the unique being assimilated into the uniform. Even if one does not agree with those who believe the tendency of the century has been increasingly injurious to the human spirit, it is hard to deny that the period has seen the widespread eclipse of values which had been considered for centuries to be essential and fundamental.
It is hard to comprehend how far-reaching, and how swift, were the changes experienced by the Western nations in the twentieth century in the wake of mechanization, industrialization, urbanization and the massification of society. It appeared as if centuries of tradition, of patterns of living, and of intellectual and religious frameworks had been swept away by a wave of technological materialism. By now, at the start of the third millennium, the bulk of Western society takes the supremacy of modernity for granted; the new is no longer a shock. We have come to accept as a natural condition what the Welsh philosopher J.R. Jones called “the crisis of lack of meaning”. The crisis has been passed, although by virtue of acceptance rather than transcendence. In the post-modern period, modernity is a fact rather than a threat; lack of meaning, deracination and alienation are clichés not crises, and the world which existed before this revolution is little more than a folk memory. From our current situation, therefore, it is difficult to recall that there was a time when the challenge of modernity was a matter of life or death for some intellectuals, a timewhen some feltthatthey were fighting for their civilization’s very existence by trying to resist the century’s new forces, and a time when the threat of destruction of the old values was enough to drive some writers andphilosophers to the escape-route of transcendentalism in a way very similar to that of the mystics of the fourteenth century. That is the period which provides the background to the four writers dealt with here; a period when the effects of the modern world were sweeping through the societies of the West creating an agonizing tension between modernity and tradition.
To be exact, I am referring to the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. The process of industrialization, of course, had been going forward since the eighteenth century, especially in Britain, and writers had been responding to this by chronicling the tension between the new ways of living and the old order and the old values. But in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth the process became headlong and inexorable, with the bulk of the Western populations becoming urban, industrial masses. As an index of the swiftness of the change, Alan Bullock, in an essay in the collection Modernism,5notes how much of the essential equipment of the modern world came into being between 1890 and 1900: the internal combustion engine; the diesel motor; the steam turbine; new fuels like oil, electricity and gas; the motor car; the bus; the tractor and aeroplane; the telephone, typewriter and tape machine; synthetic materials and plastics. John Carey, in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses,6shows how the population was multiplying at an astonishing rate, how industry was expanding, cities and suburbs growing and destroying the countryside, and traditions and religions vanishing. With the growth of democracy going hand-in-hand with the growth in population, it seemed that a kind of mass proletarian materialism was beginning to characterize society, displacing the aesthetic hierarchies of the intellectuals who had previously controlled society’s ideas.
These changes weighed very heavily on intellectuals, and, naturally enough, there was a range of responses to modernity across Western civilization, ranging from the welcoming to the indifferent, to the fearful. One could, very likely, discover a similar spectrum of responses to the changes of the fourteenth century too; for example, religious or social reformers would presumably have found it a time of excitement and hope. By the same token, in the modern period, there were some writers, like Arnold Bennett, who welcomed the freedom and material comfort that modernization brought to the bulk of the population. But in the work of many of the period’s writers a less positive response is evident, and very often what can be discerned in their work is the need for certainty, the need for something to believe in, for something to give them meaning in an increasingly unruly and threatening world. These needs became a kind of intellectual crisis in the years after the First World War, which had shattered for ever the previous social, spiritual and economic certainties. The experience of modernity in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the framework of the modern world was still being formed, was still shocking, because so many of the comforting assumptions of the past were still alive in the memoryand were part of the common intellectual legacy. The conflict was striking, and the challenge of modernity therefore seemed as if it demanded fateful decisions on the part of the thinking individual. That is what drove so many of the period’s writers and intellectuals into the folds of many different creeds which offered a brand of certainty.
The critic Richard Johnstone, in his book The Will to Believe,7speaks of the instinctive need of the period’s novelists to have something in which to put their trust. In his study of the 1930s novelists Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell, Edward Upward, Rex Warner and Evelyn Waugh, he noted that, although they had tended towards very different beliefs such as Marxism, Catholicism, or, in the case of Isherwood, the Yedanta religion, they shared “a profound need for something they felt had been lost from the world, something which would have to be replaced—belief”.8
It was, therefore, a very common tendency among the period’s writers to join political, religious or cultural causes which offered meaning amid the prevailing uncertainty. In his study of Anglo-Welsh poetry, The Cost of Strangeness, Anthony Conran describes the writers of the time:
... in their agony before the chaos that threatened them. Anything that at allmade sense of the sickness of Western Europe—Freud, the Golden Dawn, Astrology—was joyfully taken up as a rallying cry. Even the diagnosis of the class enemy, Karl Marx, was eventually, under the threat of economic collapse, red revolution and the impending renewal of world war, taken up by ruling-class ideologues like Auden and Spender.9
The socialist response was a common one; some, like Auden and Orwell, tried to join the spirit of the age and immerse themselves in the working class as one of the mass. They failed because, despite their socialist sympathies, they inevitably retained their ruling-class attitudes. There were other responses: some novelists, like Aldous Huxley in Brave New World,or the more mature Orwell in Nineteen Eighty Four,or Rex Warner in The Aerodrome, gave a dystopian vision of the ultimate consequence of the modernization and systematization of life; and in the work of H. G. Wells too there is a profound unease about the consequences of the growth of the world’s population. What characterizes all these varied responses is a general disquiet about many aspects of the power of modernity.
In this essay, I will concentrate on one group of intellectuals who responded to the challenge of the modern in a particular way: with the combination of conservative reaction and mystical withdrawal we have already noted in the responses of the mystics of the fourteenth century. This is a particular channel of thought which has been a kind of oppositional undercurrent throughout the period, and although it is a minority viewpoint it has attracted some of the main writers of the age, including two of the greatest writers of Wales. It wasa current of thought which responded to the challenge of the modern with opposition and withdrawal, a school of thought which was forced by the pressures of the modern material world to turn away from the uncertainty or ugliness of the present in order to seek utopian social ideals and transcendent religious visions.
What I am examining, therefore, is a reaction which I shall refer to from now on as the anti-modern attitude. This was a conservative response which challenged modernity in two ways: on the one hand through retreating from it, and on the other hand through offering a kind of alternative vision to mitigate or completely displace the perceived pernicious effects of the modern world. There were many aspects to the anti-modern attitude, but among its most characteristic features we could note: a religious belief which transcended the material; a tendency towards the Catholic in religion and art; a belief in order as a framework to give meaning to life; a sacramental vision of art and culture; a belief in history and tradition as the sources of inspiration and values; an appreciation of the rural rather than the urban; and a belief in the value of communities and nations to the spirit. It was an attitude which often saw the tendency of the century as godless and inhuman, as a new barbarianism which debased the individual and turned him or her into a mere part of the crowd. The intellectuals of this tendency feared the results of a modernizing process which looked as though it would destroy civilized values altogether.
Among the British and American writers who tended—to different degrees—towards these defensive, conservative ideas, were: Wyndham Lewis F. R. Leavis, Ezra Pound, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, David Jones, Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. InFrance there were Maurice Barrès, Jacques Maritain and Charles Maurras. There was a wide difference of views between all these, of course, but it is fair to link them as representatives of the conservative literary reaction to the modern world. Among the things many of them had in common was their religious disposition; a great number were Catholics, either from the cradle like Belloc or through conversion, like Chesterton, Waugh, Jones and Greene. Another thing many of them shared was patriotism, as they fostered ideals of their native or adopted countries as examples of the supposed traditional healthy society that could be set against a modern world they saw as corrupt.10
I would like to look at four of the most significant figures of this group: T. S. Eliot, Saunders Lewis, Simone Weil and R. S. Thomas. What makes them stand out from most of the other British and American writers (but not the French ones) named above is that the influence of most of the other writers was largely confined to the world of art, while Thomas, Lewis, Weil and Eliot consistently tried to be public leaders of their nations’ thought, not only in the field of literature, but also through journalism and social and political criticism, and with some success. They all came to a profound vision of the worth and the purpose of their various national communities at a time when those nations were under threat of extinction. They all nurtured the ideal of the nation as a human community embodying values other than modernity, and they all became influential spokespeople for a particular kind of traditional, social and religious nationalism, giving them an important place in the political and intellectual history of their countries. They all had a deep and public quarrel with many aspects of the modern world: its mechanization, its mass culture, its tendency to dehumanize individuals, its commercialism, its industrialism, its despoliation of the environment, its materialism, and the way it worships the supposed truths of science instead of the mysteries of the eternal. They lived in their age without conforming to it: resident aliens in the twentieth century.
However, they are not just resident aliens with regard to their historical period but also with regard to the nature of their relationship with the nations for which they became spokespeople. Firstly, they all, to some degree, adopted the country they came to represent. But secondly, and more importantly, despite their influential position as definers and proponents of defensive nationalism, they were by no means conventional nationalists at all, if we understand conventional defensive nationalism as the natural instinct of individuals to protect the environment which has formed them and which has given them a framework for their identity. These four writers embraced the nation not primarily because of its uniqueness or its importance to them as the habitat of their identity, but because of its value as a stronghold within a larger strategy of resistance to modernity. All four used an ideal of a conservative nationalcommunity as an essential part of their campaign against the threat of the twentieth century. Like Garmon in Saunders Lewis’s 1937 drama Buchedd Garmon,they came like foreigners to “stand in the gap” to defend the identity of one nation, seeing this as a part of a larger war between barbarism and civilization in general. So, although they provided a particularly profound and influential vision of the spiritual value of the nation, they did so for motives other than the simply patriotic. This being the case, if they are studied from the standpoint of their individual cultures alone, then their motives and behaviour can appear paradoxical and enigmatic. But if we compare the four and show that they all belong to an international and inter-cultural anti-modern tendency, then their relationship with their individual nations can be put into context, and at the same time, our appreciation of their status, especially that of the two Welshmen, will be enhanced.